Mixed Race Studies

Screening and Discussion of Race: The Power of an Illusion, Episode 1

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Monday, 2016-03-28, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for the first in a series of screenings and discussions of the thought-provoking PBS series Race: The Power of An Illusion, which uses science, history, and more to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding the concept of race. Post-screening discussion led by Erica Chito-Childs, author, CUNY sociology professor, and leading researcher on issues of race.

For more information and to reserve tickets, click here.

Taking race out of human genetics and memetics: We can’t achieve one without achieving the other

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2016-03-23

Carlos Hoyt

Carlos Hoyt explores race, racial identity and related issues as a scholar, teacher, psychotherapist, parent, and racialized member of our society, interrogating master narratives and the dominant discourse on race with the goal of illuminating and virtuously disrupting the racial worldview. Carlos holds teaching positions at Wheelock College, Simmons College, and Boston University in Boston Massachusetts, and has authored peer-reviewed articles on spirituality in social work practice and the pedagogy of the definition of racism. He is the author of The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, published by Oxford University Press.

Acknowledging that they are certainly not the first to do so, four scientists, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob Desalle, and Sarah Tishkoff recently called for the phasing out of the use of the concept/term “race” in biological science.

Because race is an irredeemably nebulous, confused, and confusing social construct, the authors advocate for replacing it with “ancestry.” “Ancestry,” they say, is a “process-based” concept that encourages one to seek information about genomic heritage, while race is a “patternbased” concept that induces one to organize individuals into preconceived hierarchical groupings based on shifting, murky, and contradictory combinations of appearance, geography, ability, worth, and the like.

If biological science seeks and relies on valid and maximally precise population level comparisons between groups, and race is an irrefutably imprecise proxy for consistent and concordant biological/genetic comparison, then of course we should stop using it in biology and switch over to “ancestry,” “genetic heritage,” or some other term that actually gets at what’s real, reliable, and useful. It doesn’t feel like a rocket-science proposition. And yet biological science hasn’t been able to heed the call and make the shift. And I sadly forecast that the shift won’t soon – or ever – be made – unless and until we take the step that even the well-meaning authors of this call for stop short of taking…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial people and their partners in Britain: Extending the link between intermarriage and integration?

Ethnicities
Published online 2016-03-21
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638399

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

There are now a growing number of studies on intermarriage in Western multi-ethnic societies, especially in countries with post-colonial migrants (and their descendants). Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multi-ethnic society. However, theorizing on intermarriage is typically premised upon the union (usually) of a White and non-White individual. We know little, therefore, about what happens the next generation down: the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. With whom do multiracial people partner? Furthermore, are multiracial individuals who are partnered with White people different in their outlooks, identifications, and socialization of their children, from those who have ethnic minority partners? I draw upon some findings from a Leverhulme-funded research project on multiracial people and their experiences as parents in Britain.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reflections On Rachel Dolezal, White Privilege, And “America’s Headlong Progress”

Reflections West
Montana Public Radio
2016-03-09

Tobin Shearer, Director of the African-American Studies Program; Associate Professor of History
University of Montana

W.E.B Du Bois in 1918
Cornelius Marion Battey (PD)

“For seven days in June 2015, Rachel Dolezal captured the news cycle,” writes University of Montana professor, Tobin Shearer, for “Reflections West.”

“Dolezal had led Spokane’s NAACP and taught Africana studies, but lost those positions after her parents outed her as a white person. Dolezal had presented herself as black for years.

She dropped out of the news cycle after the June 17 massacre of nine worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the aftermath of that hate-fueled attack, few wanted to hear about the tawdry details of Dolezal’s racial passing gone awry…

Listen to the story (00:04:59) here. Download the story here.

Respectability Politics: When Mixed Race People Police Each Other

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-03-17

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Respectability politics relates to the efforts of people in marginalized groups to convince their own group members to conform to the thoughts, values and practices of those in the dominant group, instead of challenging those in dominant groups about their problematic behaviours. I’ve been thinking about respectability politics a lot lately because frequently I come across this as a social justice blogger, the administrator for a feminist community and a member of various other online feminist groups.

I am pretty upfront in my activism at times. I can be very direct and expressive. I see this as the Jamaican side of my identity. Some English people can struggle to deal with this part of my Jamaican identity because it differs so widely from notions around British respectability, where traits such as politeness and being reserved and accommodating are highly valued. Other groups of people besides those who subscribe to stereotypical English norms can also struggle to deal with some of my ideas and ways of communicating, especially people who think that those in oppressed groups always have to be super nice to members of dominant groups no matter how much oppression has come their way. I do not personally subscribe to the belief that people in marginalized groups always have to be nice and placate their oppressors, or conform to their oppressor’s value systems. This is clearly oppressive in itself. When it comes down to it, I guess I have more of a Malcolm X philosophy in my approach than an Martin Luther King one (not to discredit the work of MLK). What I mean by that is I prefer radical and confrontation methods in my activism much of the time. That’s just me….

…I’ve been trying to figure out why some mixed race people engage in respectability politics. I think this is really just an elaborate defence. Critiquing whiteness can be particularly uncomfortable for some mixed race people, especially those who have some white heritage. For those of us who have some white heritage (my mother is white so I am included here), critiquing whiteness means we have to look at some of our own privileges and also perhaps how some aspects of our upbringing and family life were or are problematic. It’s not an easy journey to go on, but it’s a necessary one in order to dismantle oppression. For some mixed race people examining whiteness can feel like a betrayal of their white family members and perhaps their own identities…

Read the entire article here.

On the Boundaries of Race: Identification of Mixed-heritage Children in the United States, 1960 to 2010

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-03-17
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216632546

Carolyn A. Liebler, Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Socially constructed race groups have boundaries that define their membership. I study temporal trends and group-specific patterns in race and ancestry responses provided for children of interracial marriages. Common responses indicate contemporary definitions of race groups (and perhaps emerging groups); uncommon responses reveal socially defined limits of race group membership. I leverage dense, nonpublic, Census Bureau data from 1960 to 2010 to do this and include a more diverse set of families, a longer time span, and more accurate estimates than prior research. I find that the location of race group boundaries varies over time and across 11 distinct family types. Since mixed-heritage responses became possible in 1980, they have been common in most groups. Part Asians have almost always been reported as multiracial or mixed ancestry. A number of (non-Asian) mixed-heritage children are described as monoracial on the census form, particularly children with American Indian heritage. Over time, part whites are decreasingly reported as monoracially white (white race with no nonwhite ancestry). Black heritage is reported for part blacks, but monoracial black responses became nonmodal by 1980. Part Pacific Islanders show similarities to part Asians and part American Indians. Given the predominance of multiracial and mixed-ancestry Asian responses since 1980, Asian multiracial may be an emerging socially recognized race category. Black multiracial shows a similar pattern. Monoracial responses (especially common among white–American Indians and black–American Indians) create important but hard-to-measure complexity in groups’ compositions.

Read or purchase the article here.

The ‘R’ Word

Biteback Publishing
2015-11-27
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781849549424
eBook ISBN: 9781785900099

Kurt Barling, Professor of Journalism
Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

Race and racism remain an inescapable part of the lives of black people. Daily slights, often rooted in fears and misperceptions of the ‘other’, still damage lives. But does race matter as much as it used to? Many argue that the post-racial society is upon us and racism is no longer a block on opportunity – Kurt Barling doubts whether things are really that simple.

Ever since, at the age of four, he wished for ‘blue eyes and blond hair’, skin colour has featured prominently as he, like so many others, navigated through a childhood and adolescence in which ‘blackness’ de­fined and dominated so much of social discourse. But despite the progress that has been made, he argues, the ‘R’ word is stubbornly resilient.

In this powerful polemic, Barling tackles the paradoxes at the heart of anti-racism and asks whether, by adopting the language of the oppressor to liberate the oppressed, we are in fact paralysing ourselves within the false mythologies inherited from raciology, race and racism. Can society escape this socalled ‘race-thinking’ and re-imagine a Britain that is no longer ‘Black’ and ‘White’? Is it yet possible to step out of our skins and leave the colour behind?

The Brain Likes Categories. Where Should It Put Mixed-Race People?

Shots: Health News from NPR
National Public Radio
2016-03-15

Katherine Du

Humans like to place things in categories and can struggle when things can’t easily be categorized. That also applies to people, a study finds, and the brain’s visual biases may play a role in perceptions of mixed-race people.

The study, published in Psychological Science on Monday, asked people to sort images of people as either white or black, but it included multiracial faces in the mix, too. There has been much less research into attitudes about mixed-race people, even though they are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States.

The 235 study participants, who all self-identified as white, signed up through the online survey site Mechanical Turk and provided their ZIP codes. The researchers then used U.S. Census data to determine their level of exposure to other racial groups…

…”Where you live influences how easily you process biracial faces which may, without your awareness, be affecting your attitudes toward them,” according to Diana Sanchez, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers and an author of the study…

Read the entire article here.

Is it time to ditch the term ‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)?

The Guardian
2015-05-22

Lola Okolosie, Joseph Harker, Leah Green, and Emma Dabiri

This week, former chairman of the commission for racial equality Trevor Phillips gave a speech in which he suggested that phrases such as black and minority ethnic (BME) and black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) have become outdated, existing purely “to tidy away the messy jumble of real human beings who share only one characteristic – that they don’t have white skin”. He said the acronyms could be divisive, and actually served to mask the disadvantages suffered by specific ethnic and cultural groups. Instead, Phillips suggested, we could potentially adopt terms commonly used in the US, such as “visible minorities” or “people of colour”. Here, four writers discuss the issue…

…Leah Green: ‘I don’t feel multiple heritage – I feel mixed race’…

Read the entire article here.

Fostering Mixed Race Children: Everyday Experiences of Foster Care

Palgrave Macmillan
June 2016
203 pages
3 b/w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-54183-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-71266-3
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54184-0

Fiona Peters, Visiting Researcher
Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

The ‘mixed race’ classification is known to be a factor of disadvantage in children’s social care and this fastest growing population is more likely than any other ethnic group to experience care admission. How does knowledge of ‘mixedness’ underpin policy and practice? How, when and why is the classification ‘mixed’ a disadvantage? Through narrative interviews with children currently in foster care, Fostering Mixed Race Children examines the impact of care processes on children’s everyday experiences. Peters shows how the ‘mixed race’ classification affects care admission, including both short and long term fostering and care leaving, and shapes the experiences of children in often adverse ways. The book moves away from the psychologising of ‘mixedness’ towards a much-needed sociological analysis of ‘mixedness’ and ‘mixing’ at the intersection of foster care processes.

This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working with families and children. Peters presents a child-centred narrative focus and offers unique insights into a complex area.